1. Technical Field
The present invention relates generally to an improved apparatus, system and method for booting a data processing system from a removable medium and in particular to a method and an apparatus for booting a data processing system from a PC card.
2. Description of the Related Art
In known data processing systems, the system itself is booted from a permanent storage device in the processing system. Thus, any customization performed to the operating system, applications, peripheral devices, and the like, is specific to that particular data processing system. If a user wishes to use these same custom settings on another machine, he/she must reconfigure the other machine in the same manner as he/she did with the first machine.
Furthermore, even if the permanent storage device were removable and insertable into another data processing system, the use of the operating system, applications, settings, and the like, on the storage device may not be possible due to differences in system configuration. Thus, for example, if a permanent storage device were removed from one data processing system having a first set of peripheral devices, and placed in another data processing system having a second set of peripheral devices, the drivers stored on the storage device would not be compatible with the second set of peripheral devices. As a result, the user would be required to load new drivers for all of the new peripheral devices in the second set of peripheral devices. Such a task is extremely tedious.
In addition, in known data processing systems, if a user wishes to make use of the same applications, and their settings, that he/she used on a different data processing system, the data processing system must either already have those applications loaded or the user must install those applications for his/her use. Furthermore, any changes the user may make to the data processing system configuration may be overridden by subsequent users and thus, the user may have to reconfigure the data processing system each time he/she makes use of it.
While, for the most part, data processing systems today boot from permanent hard disks, there are occasions where a boot disk, such as a floppy disk, is used to boot the data processing system. However, these boot disks only contain a copy of the operating system that is in a form ready to load into the computer. Thus, the boot disks of known systems only contain a general copy of the operating system from which a computer may be booted. Any customization that may have been performed by a user will not be included in the operating system on the boot disk.
Thus, with the known systems, there is no mechanism by which a user may take customized settings from one data processing system and use them with a subsequent data processing system. It would be beneficial to have an apparatus, system and method for booting a data processing system from a removable medium in which the custom settings of a user are thereby transferable to a plurality of different data processing systems.
The present invention provides an apparatus, system and method for booting a data processing system from a removable medium. With the present invention, a boot sequence is started to a point at which a file system is available. At that time, driver files and registry information is copied from the data processing system to the removable medium. The boot sequence is then restarted using the driver files and registry information copied. In this way, a removable medium, having application data and user defined setting information, may be used to customize a plurality of different data processing systems while still providing the user access to the particular data processing system configuration and peripheral devices of the data processing system. Thus, the user""s customized settings provide a system interface that is familiar to the user while being able to make use of different hardware devices.